Bhakti flows in India's blood. We have so many sweet bhajans of Shiva, Krishna, Rama, Hanumana, and almost every God that we almost feel like merging with God the moment we listen to them. But our fixation on the frame of life we live in is so strong that listening to these Bhajans is just used as a sort of painkiller to give us some instant relief when we are unable to bear the pain of our own greed and ambitions. When external situations do not support us in our endeavor to achieve what we want we pray to God so that he may listen to our prayers and bless us with what we demand.
A student who has not been able to prepare well for the examination prays for its cancellation. Before an interview for a job, we pray that we get the job we are being interviewed for. We pray for the well-being of our kids, for good health, to get the assignment we want, to get promotions, positions, and so on. We pray for everything that we want in life. However, if we pray while being fixated on the frame of life, we are currently in, how can we see the possibilities beyond the current frame. Had A P J Abul Kalam prayed for the selection in the Army and had his prayers been listened to, how would he have become the President of India and a great scientist. Had Tulsidar prayed that his wife realized her mistake and said sorry to him, he would have never become the great saint of India and his words would not have inspired the generations.
Probably the starting point of Bhakti is the realization of the limitation of the current frame of life. The realization that we are stuck in our well. The prayer is not to make the well more comfortable and fill it with the people and objects we like. Rather, it is to help us come out of the well. Real prayer is always for growth. If a kid prays to his father that he should not ask him to study, the father would in fact get worried about the prayer itself and make every effort to break his kid free of the aversion to studies. The son will be surprised that his prayer is not answered by his father and on the contrary he is pushing him harder for his studies. While being fixated on the well we live in, it is difficult to understand the way our prayers get answered by the omniscient.
The least we can do to help ourselves come out of the well is to pray for growth. While being inside the well, and not having seen the world outside the well, it is difficult for us to pray for something that we have never seen. However, if we look back at our lives, we will not take more than a minute to realize that we could not have imagined where we are today, a few years back. There is some force of nature that is always guiding all of us on the path of growth. the more we get fixated on our own well, the more we resist, and the more time we take to grow. The more painful that experience feels to us. What if we have faith in that growth, even if an agnostic faith. If our parents are trying to help us study hard, that is for our own growth. If the divine is trying to navigate us to an unknown territory, that is for our own growth. Bhakti is not about begging the divine to fulfill our wishes, rather it is to surrender to the divine to carve out a sculpture out of us to the best of our capacity.
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